Quote

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.

Erica Jong

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
People
Hurt
Cowardice
Open
Innocence
Actually
Height
Often
Requires
True
Result
Today
However
Many
Courage
Believe
Results
Cynicism

More quotes by Erica Jong

Image
the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
Erica Jong
Image
We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
Erica Jong
Image
I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
Image
You're not too fat you're just in the wrong country.
Erica Jong
Image
I think the Jews are an amazing group of people and their survival is amazing.
Erica Jong
Image
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
Erica Jong
Image
The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.
Erica Jong
Image
If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong
Image
Love is everything it's cracked up to be
Erica Jong
Image
You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
Erica Jong
Image
It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.
Erica Jong
Image
Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
Erica Jong
Image
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
Erica Jong
Image
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
Erica Jong
Image
Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
Erica Jong
Image
We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.
Erica Jong
Image
Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
Erica Jong
Image
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
Erica Jong
Image
We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
Erica Jong
Image
Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Erica Jong